The Weeknd ft. Playboi Carti – Timeless
Speaking of timelessness, it’s still Grammy time for us, so let’s catch up with another beneficiary of the show.

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Jackie Powell: The irony of this track begins with its name. The adjective “timeless” refers to something that doesn’t age poorly and that doesn’t seem to have an end; its relevance and to a degree greatness is everlasting. That’s all quite paradoxical when put in the context of “Timeless,” the lead single from Abel Tesfaye’s latest and final album as The Weeknd. While Tesfaye might be saying on this track that he and his six-album body of work are timeless, the track itself isn’t very memorable, reminiscent of the redundant trap hip-hop of the 2010s. Neither was his performance of it at this year’s Grammys. When reflecting on Tesfaye’s career as The Weeknd, this collaboration won’t be even close to what he’ll be remembered for. Is that his point? I’m not sure. Maybe The Weeknd’s grand finale isn’t incumbent on the critical or mainstream success of this project’s lead single. Do lead singles even matter in 2025?
[4]
Ian Mathers: So what, “Dancing in the Flames” (which, sorry, was good) fails to go top ten, gets dropped from the album, and instead for a lead single we get a few minutes of aimless-feeling Carti and The Weeknd muttering “ever since I was young, I been legit”? What a downgrade.
[4]
Alfred Soto: The Weeknd’s latest album has a lustrous sheen: it gleams. Self-piteous confessionals have rarely sounded this immaculate. A jester who takes his tasks seriously, Playboi Carti might’ve worked as a complement to the lachrymosity, but he beams in from a star in a distant galaxy.
[5]
Leah Isobel: Generally, I find The Weeknd’s music dour and joyless. It might use pop form and pop sound, but the point is to express an isolated sourness in direct opposition to the communal awe and wonder that pop should articulate. (Though I guess I’m in the minority on that opinion.) “Timeless,” however, actually works for me, partly because I’m a sucker for these trance bleep-bloops. But here, I think it’s more about the space between them, the way the sounds just bounce around in the abyss; the darkness is a legible part of the soundscape, rather than being grafted on in lyrics or videos or performances. This frees up Mr. Weeknd to just radiate charisma, pulsing waves of blue light within the void. I imagine that pop stardom completely strips away any illusions a person might have about society being just or fair; at a certain level of fame, you get irrevocably over-familiar with the utter meaninglessness of the systems of celebrity and power. The song articulates this. It indicates a surrender of one’s interior darkness, a dissolution into a greater understanding that we are all just totally fucked, trading the gothic for the cosmic.
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Katherine St. Asaph: He isn’t wrong about being timeless: this is the schtick of House of Balloons from 2011, plus edginess from 2005 Internet fora (“if I was you, I would cut up my wrist” USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST), plus a trap beat over what could be an instrumental from mp3.com in 2000.
[6]
Al Varela: The blooping beat that chugs alongside a sterile trap snare, rarely budging from its steady 120 BPM tempo, makes for a boring trap banger that doesn’t even bother to do anything with its Mike Dean synth swells. Playboi Carti channels his most boring, safe, anonymous mode, and the Weeknd doesn’t fare much better. His high-pitched, smooth croon doesn’t fit the middling atmosphere, and none of his dark and seductive hedonism comes through; he just sounds bored talking about the girls he fucks and the success he’s gotten. Those are both things that The Weeknd has excelled at in his music, including on the album this was eventually put on! I don’t know when the general public developed such bad taste in Weeknd songs, but it’s not like they came to “Timeless” for him anyway.
[3]
Mark Sinker: My Weeknd theory — as in, how tf does he have the most listens of any artist in history? (Citation: claim made by the bots on Google, above what yr actually looking for.) He’s broken through to the most effective version of the generative ambient music that Eno long dreamt of (and now panics about lol). Weeknd listens are the long loops people set in place when they need to focus-work without interruption. No, but there’s more: what if Weeknd listens are the long loops that AI learning bots set in place when they need to SLOP without interruption? On the upside, the backing is kind of soothingly pretty, no lie. Downside? World mouth-of-marbles champ Carti filtered down to essence-of-shoegaze earfloss.
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Melody Esme: Inspiring Genius annotation: “While Playboi Carti has a history of physically assaulting women, in this line ‘hit’ is slang for having sex.” Hmm.
[4]
Andrew Karpan: “Who even is that guy?” my partner asked me when Playboi Carti suddenly appeared on stage at the Grammys, shortly after Harvey Mason Jr. played a montage of news clips aggregating stories about The Weeknd’s promise to never play the awards show again. Well, there he was, a grand avatar of nothing, struggling to reheat a single he put out months ago and largely failing to introduce Mr. Carti to the millions of gathered fans of “Not Like Us.” Even the way the pair trade bars on this record is depressing, a kind of empty chanting that fills up space.
[4]
Julian Axelrod: Doechii’s immaculate Grammys showcase wasn’t just devastating for the Bensons and Teddys in her immediate vicinity; its shockwaves rippled all the way out to rattle Playboi Carti’s lifeless appearance during the Weeknd’s grand return to the awards show stage. I’m the last guy you’ll hear argue that a bars-forward classicist live performer is inherently superior to a shy guy crooning about his jeans over an itchy synth line. (I spent most of 2024 banging the drum for Carti’s feature on “I LUV IT,” a true star turn on a genuinely challenging collab.) But it’s hard to watch the two sets back to back and not consider that Carti, a stadium performer (?) whose stage presence is 60% jacket, has appeared multiple times on both the Grammys and SNL with the energy of a teenager being dragged out of his room to meet his parents’ friends’ kids. It speaks to the mainstreaming of two artists who at one point had a convincing air of danger and mystery, but now clock into separate halves of an ambient Pharrell/Mike Dean beat like coworkers in adjoining cubicles.
[5]
Nortey Dowuona: Hey, so now that The Weeknd is dead can we get the Amharic album? And can she be on it?
[6]
Jel Bugle: Just a big heap of nothing, an autotune blob. Even the usually effervescent Carti can’t save this one. Imagine listening to the whole album!
[3]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: So boring that it becomes compelling again — this is the closest thing I can imagine to the cosmic background radiation of streaming-era pop, a luxuriously sterile collaboration between two formerly avant-garde megastars that possesses all the chemistry of a corporate merger. The synths are expensive enough that my brain wants this to be good; my heart can’t do it.
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